Several decades of investigatiOn indicate that dimensions of marital funCtioning are related to aspects of children's long-term social and emotional adjustment and immediate coping responses. The goal of the proposed research is to examine relations between early adolescents' exposure to varying patterns of marital communication and parental conflict and the development of social competence in a sample of sixth graders and their parents. Several sets of processes will be examined that are assumed to function as mediating mechanisms through which the family and peer contexts are linked. First, a number of emotion processing abilities are assumed to function as mediators of children's exposure to parental interactions including emotional understanding, knowledge of emotional display rules, and emotional regulatory abilities. Second, it is postulated that children develop various forms of cognitive representations concerning the nature of social relationships in the course of participation in family relationships as well as observation of parent-parent interaction. A secondary goal of the proposed research is to comparatively explore these processes in Mexican-American and Euro- American families. Although it is assumed that similar processes will be operative in both groups, the current study will permit exploratory examination of some domains that may be sensitive to cultural variations. The proposed study will advance knowledge in this area by exploring links between marital conflict and parental communication styles and the social competence of early adolescents, a relatively unstudied period in children's development. Second, this study proposes to examine pathways described in two conceptual models that to date remain untested empirically, by using dimensions of emotional understanding and regulation such as emotional reactivity and coping in as well as aspects of adolescents' social cognitions that have clear links to adolescents'.